There are meals in almost every restaurant serving off-menu items that you would never be lucky enough to eat unless you worked in the restaurant. They’re called family meals and they're served before or after service to feed those who work tirelessly to bring good food to your table — staff members who rarely get a chance to eat during their busy shift.

My folks are coming to Seattle for a visit in a couple of weeks and I’m already making a list of where I want to take them—specifically, newer spots they haven’t been since the last time they were here almost a year ago.
The parents have been coming to visit me in Seattle for more than 20 years, so this isn’t their first rodeo, letting me drag them around to different food and booze parlors. I think they actually enjoy it. A few years ago they moved from Olympia to a somewhat remote part of Arizona, where really great food is not always easy to come by.

There are meals in almost every restaurant serving off-menu items that you would never be lucky enough to eat unless you worked in the restaurant. They’re called family meals and they're served before or after service to feed those who work tirelessly to bring good food to your table — staff members who rarely get a chance to eat during their busy shift.

Our dear food and dining editor Julien Perry was the subject of a culinary Q&A over on OpenTable's blog. (Read the entire post here.) In it, Perry reveals her fave restaurants and cuisines as well as her pre-foodie past (something we fellow Seattle mag-ers didn't even know): "I used to be a bodybuilder and was on a strict diet for most of the mid '90s.

The Hurricane Café is closing after a 20 year run in Seattle. The former Dog House has been sold to Amazon. Actually, the entire block it sits on has been sold.
“With our lease, there was a demolition clause where they could give us a one-year notice,” says current owner Neil Scott (pictured below), who bought the greasy spoon nearly 13 years ago, making him the third owner.
Scott found out back in January that he’d be losing his restaurant.

There are meals in almost every restaurant serving off-menu items that you would never be lucky enough to eat unless you worked in the restaurant. They’re called family meals and they're served before or after service to feed those who work tirelessly to bring good food to your table — staff members who rarely get a chance to eat during their busy shift.

A first time restaurateur with a background in 3-D animation and a penchant for modernist cooking is opening a restaurant on Capitol Hill this fall.
Chris Cvetkovich gave me a tour yesterday of his upcoming project on 14th Ave. (in the REO Flats) that will be sandwiched between Artusi and Porchlight Coffee.

Aleks Dimitrijevic is closing his Capitol Hill restaurant La Bête on August 16, three days before its fourth birthday
“We hope that you all pay us a visit over the next four weeks to say goodbye, lord knows that I’ll need as good of a send off as possible to make the next phase less of a financial burden,” he wrote on La Bête’s Facebook page Friday, announcing its impending departure.

There are meals in almost every restaurant serving off-menu items that you would never be lucky enough to eat unless you worked in the restaurant. They’re called family meals and they're served before or after service to feed those who work tirelessly to bring good food to your table — staff members who rarely get a chance to eat during their busy shift.

Eric Banh has been a popular staple in the Capitol Hill dining scene since opening Monsoon in 1999, not long after moving back from Alberta, Canada where his family landed after moving out of Vietnam when Banh was 15-years-old. In Edmonton, Banh held several cooking jobs and even had his own restaurant called Lemon Grass Cafe.

When Bell & Whete (“wheat”) officially opened its doors on Saturday (here are 10 things to know about the restaurant), it became the newest hot spot to hit Belltown—a masculine, meat-heavy, Medieval-inspired restaurant sandwiched between Local 360 and The Crocodile

Monica Dimas is the spunky, ambitious, smart-as-a-whip and extremely talented sous chef at Ethan Stowell’s Mkt. While her petite stature matches the 600-square-feet of the tiny restaurant, her appetite does not. At all.
During a recent dinner outing with the human stomach, the topic of her eating habits came up, which enthralled me to no end.
Here’s what she eats on her typical days off.

There are meals in almost every restaurant serving off-menu items that you would never be lucky enough to eat unless you worked in the restaurant. They’re called family meals and they're served before or after service to feed those who work tirelessly to bring good food to your table — staff members who rarely get a chance to eat during their busy shift.

Sara Naftaly is best known in Seattle for co-owning Le Gourmand with her husband Bruce before it closed in June 2012 after nearly 30 years in business. The corner brick space in Ballard now houses Brimmer & Heeltap.